Dolans Drop Out of Wireless Auction

Dolan Family Holdings, a group headed by Cablevision Systems chairman Charles Dolan, appears to be the latest casualty in the ongoing Federal Communications Commission Advanced Wireless Spectrum (AWS) auctions.

Dolan Family, which has made a $150 million deposit to participate in the auction and was an aggressive bidder in the early rounds, seems to have dropped out of the running. According to the auction website, Dolan Family stopped bidding on spectrum licenses after the 20th round. And all five of the group’s provisionally winning bids – including a $390.1 million offer for licenses in New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont – have been bested by others.

According to the auction website, Dolan Family’s $390.1 million bid was bested in the 20th round by a $496 million offer from SpectrumCo, a consortium of Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Bright House Networks and Sprint Nextel. Its four 12th round provisionally winning bids for Bridgeport-Stamford- Danbury, Conn.; Orange County, N.Y.; Poughkeepsie, N.Y.; and Sussex County, N.J., were bested by Antares Holdings and T-Mobile.

Through 24 rounds, the auction for 1,122 licenses for broadband spectrum has raised about $11.1 billion. In the 16th round, a consortium of direct broadcast satellite giants DirecTV Group and EchoStar Communications, also dropped out of the bidding.